10/04/2026
Out of Body
This year, the Village Halloween Parade celebrates “Body and Soul” The separation of matter and spirit, of life and death, becomes less clear on Hallow’s Eve, when the Skeletons – the OG “All Souls” – reunite with their bodies to dance one more time. How easily we forget that this deep entanglement of body and soul, so palpable on Halloween Night, is really true all the time. Even as the skeletons journey inward to their bodies, we journey outward every night, sleepwalking into the netherworld – where dreams await.
We dream in our bodies (often of our bodies), even as our souls traverse terrains of memory and imagination. When we fly in our dreams, we can feel our buoyancy with arms outstretched. When we walk through imagined landscapes, our feet feel the ground shift beneath us. We feel the passage of minutes or hours, even as no time elapses. Sleep endows us with the power to experience – again and again – a momentary uplift from our physical constraints, to remake the world on our own terms. Like the classic depiction of the Soul hovering over the Death-bed, we are out of body, yet fully embodied – a liminal space between life and death, where we remember, fleetingly, that anything is possible.
So this year, we invite the Parade to walk with us through a waking dream. A dozen luminous sleeping figures, clad in their pajamas and nightgowns, discover a domestic space intimately familiar yet unsettlingly strange. A tilting house of open windows, in which everyday objects come to life with uncanny grace, books and clocks take flight, and eyes, ears, and teeth swirl about in a sea of sensory mischief, replaying and banishing the worries of the day, to greet the morning and make the world anew.
Written by: Alex Kahn and Sophia Michahelles (Processional Arts Workshop)
